Already a subscriber?Travel agents are openly marketing holidays – including visits to Disneyland in Japan and helicopter plus mini-golf tours in the Barossa Valley – to people on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, in what registered providers say is a major rort of the taxpayer-funded program.
“The majority of unregistered providers just rape and pillage,” Mr Negri said. “Look on social media. They’re all saying ‘Oh, we can give you respite’. That’s all over social media.” Mr Shorten is charged with meeting the Albanese government’s pledge to cut the scheme’s cost growth to 8 per cent. Federal and state governments funnelled $44.3 billion into the scheme last financial year as its costs grew 21 per cent, according to the May budget papers.
Other plan managers had become experts at hunting down expired accounts to tap off the leftover dollars from yearly plans disabled people have not realised are still available.Mr Dardo said a whole industry had been created to effectively “commoditise” NDIS participants as buckets of money, ripe for the picking.
Nearly two-thirds of NDIS participants have plan managers who aid in their spending. Mr Dardo was scathing about the long tail of smaller plan managers, who when tested were found to make cash reimbursements without any evidence, or making dodgy payments to related people or businesses.Plans are automatically rolled over and there is no legal requirement to respond to the NDIS, even when it is clear there is dodgy behaviour.